I've got an unrooted, plain vanilla 4.2.1 Nexus 4. Sometimes it randomly reboots itself while using it (and for all I know when it's not using it). Less than once a day problably, but I can't find a cause. IT does a weird sort of half-reboot too; it goes immediately to the big glowing X screen without the white Google screen that comes up during a cold reboot (off, then on).

The reboots don't seem to be caused by anything in particular; I've had one while running Chrome and one while running Gameboid. both of those run fine 99% of the time too, nothing has triggered the reboot more than once so I don't think it's a specific app.

Is this a known bug or caused by something or what? I'm mostly only using apps that worked on my last phone (which wasn't android 4.2) and stock apps, so I don't think it's any fishy apps.

Not an answer since I don't know why, but I haven't had this problem in quite a while. It might have been because of an update to some app/the OS but I'm not sure when it resolved itself/if the general problem is fixed.
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Ben BrockaJun 2 '13 at 16:30

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Can you try to switch runtime from Dalvik to ART and see if this helps? You need to enable Developer options for doing this (About phone -> Build number, and make 7 taps there).
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StanDec 19 '13 at 17:21

@Stan actually I think an update (perhaps 4.3?) or something fixed this, or I was just lucky. I no longer have my nexus 4 but I hadn't had this issue for a few months prior to getting my Nexus 5. Either way I'm afraid I can't test that myself.
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Ben BrockaDec 19 '13 at 22:25

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Well, in my case upgrade even to the latest 4.4.2 did not solve the problem, but after switching the runtime it's running several days. This is possibly another similar bug in the OS. It happened at nights as well, when nobody used the device and it's presumably caused by garbage collection.
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StanDec 20 '13 at 8:20

1 Answer
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I've experienced random reboots on Android 4.2 on the Nexus 7. From my research it looks like there may be an issue with Google's location services, but that's not verified. I don't think it's unique to your device in any case.